Dr. DeMars was on vacation on some remote tropical island, with a frosty beverage in his hand. He was laughing maniacally at the misfortune of his 453 students, and applauding his clever use of social media as a way to induce stress and fear in his students. Or, he was holed up in his office twiddling his thumbs waiting for somebody to catch on... Even if he decided to play hooky, it did not matter because his students had about all they could take. All Dr. DeMars needed was access to a computer with Internet capabilities, or even just a smart phone and he could wreak havoc on his young, innocent students. By setting up my Twitter account to forward all of Dr. DeMars' tweets to my phone I could keep up with his diabolical plans and stay abreast of the latest scheme he had concocted. Then, I arrived at the Gee Library and sat down and accessed the social media avenues I needed in order to thwart his plans.
By using social media we have unlimited access to each other, students can keep up with changes to their classes. Teachers can quickly reach all of their students with important updates, and exams can be conducted remotely. By creating an open workspace the Internet has freed up the process of taking exams and allows students to access resources so that their responses are well thought out and intelligent, at least that’s the plan. The test process on Thursday was very different from a traditional exam. Since, we, the students, did not know what was going on till we got our emailed instructions, there was quite a bit of apprehension. There were constant distractions due to the nature of the library and focusing on the task was difficult at times. However, despite the differences Thursday was like any other exam. There were questions and a time limit within which we had to construct our answers. We could have had class in Second Life, that would have been really different. Or, we could have posted our answers entirely through Twitter.
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